A location determination system, such as a Global Positioning System (GPS), allows a mobile device, such as a mobile phone, a smart phone, a personal media player, a GPS receiver, etc., to determine its current location on the earth. The location of the mobile device is typically calculated as a set of coordinates, such as the longitude and latitude coordinates of a point on the surface of the earth.
However, the location of the mobile device in the form of coordinates of a point on the surface of the earth does not provide sufficient information of interest about the location, such as whether the mobile device is within a particular region associated with a set of known properties.
For example, it may be of interest in certain applications to determine whether the location of the mobile device is within the store of a merchant, within the home of the user of the mobile device, within a recreation area, within a commercial district, etc.
For example, U.S. Pat. App. Pub. No. 2014/0012806, published Jan. 9, 2014 and entitled “Location Graph Based Derivation of Attributes”, discusses the generation of a user profile based on mapping the locations of a mobile device to predefined geographical regions and use the attributes associated with the predefined geographical regions to derive and/or augment the attributes of the user profile.
For example, U.S. Pat. App. Pub. No. 2008/0248815, published Oct. 9, 2008 and entitled “Systems and Methods to Target Predictive Location based Content and Track Conversions”, discusses the need to analyze the location of a mobile device to determine the types of businesses that the user of the mobile device typically visits, or visited. When the location of a mobile device is within a predefined distance from either the address of a particular business or a geographic location associated with the business, or within a geometric perimeter of the particular business location, it may be determined that the user of the mobile device was at the particular business.
Ray Casting is a known technology to determine whether a given point is within a polygon represented by a set of vertexes. However, Ray Casting is computational intensive involving floating point number computations.
The Military Grid Reference System (MGRS) is a standard used for locating points on the earth. It uses grid squares of various lengths at different resolutions, such as 10 km, 1 km, 100 m, 10 m, or 1 m, depending on the precision of the coordinates provided. A MGRS coordinate includes a numerical location within a 100,000 meter square, specified as n+n digits, where the first n digits give the easting in meters, and the second n digits give the northing in meters.
There are statistical methods developed to estimate the size of an animal population. For example, Wikipedia (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_and_recapture) discusses methods such as mark and capture and related methods such as capture-recapture. Louis-Paul Rivet and Tina Levesque disclose “improved log-linear model estimators of abundance in capture-recapture experiments” in the Canadian Journal of Statistics, Vol. 29, No. 4, 2001, pages 555-572. Sophie Baillargeon and Louis-Paul Rivest disclose “Rcapture: Loglinear Models for Capture-Recapture in R”, in Journal of Statistical Software, Vol. 19, Issue 5, April 2007.
For example, to estimate the population of a specific species, an ecologist would capture and release a small portion of their target species in distinct capture occasions. By counting the number of unique animals captured one-time, two-times, three-times, etc., a capture-recapture method can be used to estimate the number of animals they missed. Thus, an estimate of the total number of animals in a given location can be obtained.
The disclosures of the above discussed patent documents are hereby incorporated herein by reference.